Commvault Systems - Q3 2024
January 30, 2024
Transcript
Operator (participant)
Hello, and welcome to the Commvault Q3 fiscal year 2024 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session, and if you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star one on your telephone keypad. I will now turn the conference over to Michael Melnyk, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Michael J Melnyk (Head of Investor Relations)
Good morning, and welcome to our earnings conference call. I'm Michael Melnyk, Head of Investor Relations, and I'm joined by Sanjay Mirchandani, Commvault CEO, and Gary Merrill, Commvault CFO. An earnings presentation with key financial and operating metrics is posted on the investor relations website for reference. Statements made on today's call will include forward-looking statements about Commvault, future expectations, plans, and prospects. All such forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Please refer to the cautionary language in today's earnings release and Commvault's most recent periodic reports filed with the SEC for a discussion of the risks and uncertainties that could cause the company's actual results to be materially different from those contemplated in the forward-looking statements. Commvault does not assume any obligation to update these statements. During this call, Commvault's financial results are presented on a non-GAAP basis.
A reconciliation between the Non-GAAP and GAAP measures can be found on our website. Thank you again for joining us. Now I'll turn it over to Sanjay for his opening remarks. Sanjay?
Sanjay Mirchandani (President & CEO)
Thank you, Michael. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. I am pleased to report our Q3 results exceeded expectations, including double-digit year-over-year growth across our most important KPIs. By our own metrics, this was an exceptional quarter. We also set the stage for the future by introducing market-leading innovation with Commvault Cloud, our revolutionary platform for cyber resilience. Some financial highlights include: Total revenue increased 11% year-over-year to $217 million. This was driven by a 31% increase in subscription revenue, which now represents more than half of our total revenue. Total ARR, the primary metric we use to measure underlying growth, grew 17% year-over-year to over $750 million. Subscription ARR grew 29% year-over-year to $571 million, and is now over 75% of total ARR.
SaaS ARR increased 77% year-over-year to $152 million, and we expanded operating margins by 180 basis points year-over-year, while continuing to repurchase shares. These results reinforce that Commvault's products and services are in more demand than ever, especially as companies grapple with how to keep their data secure, compliant, and resilient in a world increasingly under threat of cyber attacks. For two years now, we've discussed how the volume, intensity, and sophistication of cyber attacks would require a radically different approach to cyber resiliency. Gone are the days when when perimeter security alone would suffice. It's just a matter of time until the bad actors get in. So rather than just looking at prevention, CIOs and CSOs alike are putting a heavy emphasis on recovery and resilience.
This transition has fueled the most important pivot in our 27-year history. In November, we introduced Commvault Cloud, powered by Metallic AI. This platform brings together the best of all worlds: industry-leading data protection, combined with data security, data intelligence, and recovery. Commvault Cloud offers the fastest, most reliable recovery of any solution on the market today. With our platform, data can be restored from anywhere to anywhere, rapidly, reliably, and at massive scale. The platform provides AI capabilities, giving customers automated and predictive recovery, threat intelligence, and operational efficiencies to deliver true cyber resilience. No longer will organizations need to make unnatural choices between SaaS and other data center workloads. With our platform, we support more workloads than any other vendor in our space, and we do all of this at the lowest total cost of ownership.
We've scaled the platform, integrating with major hyperscalers, as well as leading cybersecurity and AI companies like Avira, Darktrace, Databricks, Microsoft Sentinel, and Palo Alto Networks, among others. I'm pleased to share that customers, partners, and industry analysts have been raving about it. For instance, one customer told analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group, "We are a highly regulated industry. Commvault Cloud was the only solution we found that gives us the flexibility and assurance that satisfied our auditors. Because of Commvault Cloud, I can assure our leadership team that we are protected, and we all sleep better at night." IDC Research Vice President Phil Goodwin said, "This announcement realigns Commvault's products to meet customer preferences and sets the company on a path to be very competitive in cyber resilience." We continue to introduce major innovations in the platform that solve critical customer challenges.
For example, with our Clean Room Recovery offering, we are closing the gap that exists between incident response planning and readiness. Our new Clean Room Recovery capabilities enables customers to thoroughly and cost-effectively test their recovery plans. It also provides them with a safe, on-demand environment to recover. It is this kind of groundbreaking innovation that sets us apart from the competition and helps us take share and land new business. In fiscal Q3, we added another 500 subscription customers, bringing our total to almost 9,000. Subscription customers now represent well over half of our total active customer base. A couple of examples include: a large state agency that detected security gaps with its incumbent vendor. This new customer turned to Commvault for immutable air gap ransomware protection, anomaly detection, and an improved cyber resilience posture.
We also helped the Fortune 500 capital equipment company eliminate its patchwork of vendors and move their workloads onto our unified platform. This allowed them to modernize and improve their cyber resilience posture, better protecting them from ransomware with a lower total cost of ownership. To expand our perspective and keep us at the forefront of innovation, we also established a cyber resilience council comprised of security visionaries from top cyber, cloud, and government organizations. The council would advise on security trends and cyber threats, which will shape product development, strategy, and partnering opportunities. It is chaired by Melissa Hathaway, a thought leader in cybersecurity and digital risk management, who served in two presidential administrations. We're two months away from closing our fiscal year, and I couldn't be more excited about our momentum as we approach fiscal year 2025.
With that, I'll turn it over to Gary to discuss our results. Gary?
Gary Merrill (CFO)
Thanks, Sanjay, and good morning, everyone. I am pleased to report strong revenue and earnings outperformance in Q3. Starting with the top line. Total revenue was $217 million, an increase of 11% year-over-year, and significantly outpaced our Q3 expectations. Our total revenue growth was highlighted by a 31% year-over-year increase in subscription revenue to $114 million, reflective of both solid double-digit growth in term software licenses and an accelerating contribution of SaaS revenue. Our execution was strong as large software deal close rates improved sequentially, and we delivered against our largest term subscription renewal quarter of the fiscal year. This execution resulted in term software deals over $100,000, up 25% year-over-year, driven by increases in both average selling price and deal volume.
Q3 perpetual license revenue was $15 million, as these perpetual licenses are generally sold in limited verticals and geographies. At the current run rate, we believe that the headwinds to our reported total revenue growth for perpetual license sales are normalizing as we exit the current fiscal year. Q3 customer support revenue, which includes support for both our term-based and perpetual software licenses, was $77 million, down just 1% year-over-year. Q3 and fiscal year 2024 continued to benefit from the continued trends of fewer conversions of perpetual support contracts to term software licenses. Year to date, customer support revenue from perpetual licenses represents 54% of total customer support, with the balance coming from term software and related arrangements. This compares to approximately 60% in fiscal year 2023 and 75% in fiscal year 2022.
At this trajectory, we expect customer support revenue from term-based software licenses to become the majority of our customer support revenue next fiscal year. Moving from revenue results to ARR. Q3 ARR was $752 million, representing 17% year-over-year growth, and continues to reflect the underlying strength of our business when our revenue is presented on an annualized basis. Subscription ARR, which includes term-based software arrangements and SaaS contracts, increased 29% year-over-year to $571 million. Within subscription, SaaS ARR grew 77% year-over-year to $152 million, driven by new customer acquisition and strong expansion with existing customers. Q3 SaaS net dollar retention rate, or NRR, was a healthy 125%. Now I'll discuss expenses and profitability.
Fiscal Q3 gross margins increased 90 basis points sequentially to 82.9% and includes continued improvement in our SaaS gross margins. Fiscal Q3 operating expenses were $132 million, up 9% year-over-year, reflecting the impact of our planned go-to-market investments throughout fiscal year 2024 and higher marketing spend during the quarter, including our SHIFT event in New York City. Overall, operating expenses as a percentage of total revenue was 61%, representing 100 basis points of leverage year-over-year, consistent with our objective to manage expenses relative to revenue results. We ended the quarter with a global headcount of approximately 2,900 employees, flat sequentially and up 3% year-over-year. Our current headcount balance includes additional inside sales teams, renewal and related customer success teams to support the customer journey and our accelerating velocity sales motion.
Non-GAAP EBIT for Q3 increased 21% year-over-year to $47 million, and non-GAAP EBIT margins increased 180 basis points year-over-year to 21.5%. Moving to some key balance sheet and cash flow metrics. We ended the quarter with no debt and $284 million in cash, of which $88 million was in the United States. Our Q3 free cash flow grew 45% year-over-year to $43 million. Through the first three quarters of the fiscal year, we generated $121 million of free cash flow, an increase of 20% year-over-year. The biggest drivers of free cash flow are SaaS deferred revenue and the strength of our software subscription renewals, which typically include upfront payment on multiyear contracts.
In Q3, we repurchased $51 million of stock under our repurchase program, resulting in year-to-date repurchases totaling $134 million, representing 111% of year-to-date free cash flow. Now, I'll discuss our outlook for fiscal Q4 and the full fiscal year 2024. All of the following guidance metrics are based on current foreign currency exchange rates. For fiscal Q4, we expect subscription revenue, which includes both the software portion of term-based licenses and SaaS, to be $111 million-$115 million. This represents 20% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. This Q4 subscription revenue outlook reflects continued momentum in our new customer and expansion business, but a smaller renewal pool in fiscal Q4 relative to Q3. As a result, we expect total revenue to be $210 million-$214 million.
At these revenue levels, we expect Q4 consolidated gross margins to be in the range of 81%-82%, and EBIT margins in the range of 20%-21%. We continue to execute some foundational go-to-market changes, which include amplifying our discrete focus on our land and expand opportunities, scaling our motion to secure our growing subscription renewal base, and investing to capitalize on our fiscal year 2025 growth objectives. These investments are reflected in the range of our Q4 margin guidance. Our projected diluted share count for fiscal Q4 is approximately 44.5 million shares. Now, I want to give an updated outlook on the full fiscal year 2024, which includes, once again, raising our total revenue and total ARR expectations for the full year.
We expect fiscal year 2024 total ARR growth of 15% year-over-year, which reflects a 100 basis point increase over our prior guidance. We now expect subscription ARR, which includes term-based licenses and SaaS, to increase 25% year-over-year and reflects a similar 100 basis point increase over our prior guidance. From a revenue perspective, we now expect subscription revenue to be in the range of $420 million-$424 million, growing 21% year-over-year at the midpoint, reflecting the continued momentum in our business and is a $9 million increase at the midpoint compared to our prior guidance. At these revenue levels, subscription revenue will exceed over 50% of our total revenues for the full year.
We expect total revenue to be in the range of $826 million-$830 million, reflecting an $11 million increase at the midpoint compared to our prior guidance. Our improved fiscal year 2024 total revenue outlook reflects the seasonally stronger subscription software trends that we usually experience in the second half of the fiscal year, combined with the ongoing momentum of our SaaS offerings. Moving to full year fiscal 2024 margin, EBIT and cash flow outlook. We continue to expect gross margins of 82%-83% and non-GAAP EBIT margin expansion of 50 to 100 basis points year-over-year. We are also maintaining our expected full-year free cash flows of $170 million....
As of December 31st, we had $122 million remaining on our existing share repurchase authorization, and we expect to continue with our existing practice of repurchasing at least 75% of our annual free cash flows. Year to date, we are pacing well ahead of this target, and we intend to continue the share repurchase momentum during the current quarter. For details and trends on all of our key metrics, please take time to review our investor deck contained on the investor relations section of our website. Operator, you can now open the line for questions.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question, it is star one on your telephone keypad. Your first question comes from the line of Aaron Rakers of Wells Fargo. Your line is open.
Aaron Rakers (Managing Director, Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Yeah, thanks, guys, for taking the question, and congrats on the good quarter. I guess the first question, and I appreciate that you're not going to give guidance looking out into fiscal 2025, but I'm just curious, with the momentum you're seeing in subscription and obviously the SaaS business as well, how do you guys start to think about seasonality and, you know, in particular, thinking about the March quarter? And I guess I'll layer into that: How do we think about the customer support growth as that starts to—the rate of decline starts to ease and maybe we return to growth as we look into next fiscal year?
Gary Merrill (CFO)
Hey, Aaron, good morning. It's Gary. Nice to hear from you, and I'll start off. You asked a couple different things. Maybe I'll start with the Q4 piece of it, the current March quarter perspective. So Q3, just looking back at the quarter we just finished, was a really significant quarter for us. By our own measures, it's one of the best, if not the best quarter we've ever had. And we're really starting to see that cyber is changing the way that people are buying. So some of the trends we saw during that quarter gave us the confidence to raise both our Q4 and full year numbers. And as you mentioned about specifically subscription revenue, right? Our guidance is less about 20% growth year-over-year at the midpoint.
And what we're seeing and what we're expecting in fiscal Q4 is continued momentum in that land and expand motion. Also, the SaaS revenue that we're now generating is a tailwind and provides more predictability to our P&L. Those together will see a slightly smaller renewal opportunity in fiscal Q4 relative to Q3. So that's also reflected into our guidance, as fiscal Q3 had the largest renewal pool we've ever had in our history. So we think those trends, along with continued execution and some really good acceleration in our partner ecosystem, is really gonna help us set the foundation for next year. What's also helping, as you mentioned, relative to our total revenue, is what's happening in the customer support revenue.
And what, what you see there is that the declines year-over-year are starting to get mitigated and now down into the low—into the low single digits. Some of that's reflective of viewer conversions that I mentioned on last call. We continue to see viewer conversions that then eliminate some of the headwinds we see in support. So some of those headwinds will get mitigated going into next fiscal year, which would also provide some of that continued momentum we'll see.
Aaron Rakers (Managing Director, Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Yeah, Gary, I appreciate that. Let, let me maybe kind of double-click on that and just ask more succinctly. Do you think the customer support revenue can turn to growth?
Gary Merrill (CFO)
Yeah.
Aaron Rakers (Managing Director, Senior Equity Research Analyst)
as we look into next fiscal year?
Gary Merrill (CFO)
No. I would say, as I look in the next fiscal year, I would say flat to slightly down is what I would expect on a full year basis, Aaron, is what I would expect at this point. I think by the end of next fiscal year, the term component, like the maintenance and support piece from our term licenses, will become the majority of that customer support. But I think that will take us into the back half of next year, which means that on a full year basis, we'll slightly be kind of probably low single digits down.
Aaron Rakers (Managing Director, Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Yeah, that's helpful. And then the final quick question. You know, on the term side, can you just talk about what you're seeing from a, from a term perspective? You know, term, you know, the term length of the, of the deals you're engaged with. It sounds like large deals have improved. The macro might have eased. So just kind of any updated thoughts on, on what you're seeing, any kind of, you know, term lengths or term compression dynamics?
Gary Merrill (CFO)
Yeah, absolutely. So what we continue to see now is stabilization in our term lengths. Last quarter, we saw the, I'd say, the first quarter stabilization. This quarter, we saw another quarter of stabilization. On the subscription side, our average term is still rounding to about two years, but that stabilization, which is also demonstrated by good execution, but also demand for our cyber resilient products, is also giving a little more predictability in there. The other piece there, and that's also critical to this, is how we align with the partner ecosystem, right? Those bigger deals and larger transformational projects are tied with some of the new modern partner ecosystem, whether it be hyperscalers or others, and they also provide some, you know, some foundational support for keeping that term length healthy.
Sanjay Mirchandani (President & CEO)
Hey, Aaron, it's Sanjay. I'll just add one more point. As customers start really moving and pivoting to the hybrid model and hybrid cloud workloads, our platform allows them to do that mitigation and move their, their workloads and have the same, have the same, technology support them, both in the cloud and data centric. So you know, we're seeing, we're seeing that as well. So that's helping as well.
Aaron Rakers (Managing Director, Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Thanks, guys.
Operator (participant)
Your next question comes from the line of Howard Ma with Guggenheim Securities. Your line is open.
Howard Ma (Director, Equity Research Analyst, Software Sector)
... Great, thanks, and impressive results. I have a question first for Sanjay. Sanjay, if you were to dissect the outperformance in the quarter, I guess between the general spending environment maybe improving, it looks like, you know, it might be and secular tailwinds that of a, you know, consolidating or increasing infrastructure and security budgets. If, you know, that versus your own internal execution, you know, so-
Mm-hmm.
new product initiatives and go-to-market execution. And I understand it might be hard to separate, you know, the internal from external. But if you could, if you were to force the stack rank, you know, the internal versus external, you know, I'm curious what your thoughts would be.
Sanjay Mirchandani (President & CEO)
Well, I'd say... I would say it's probably 75%, for this quarter that passed, 75% internal. And I would say that because really, Howard, Gary touched on this, our own business transformation, moving our, you know, moving our install base of customers and our new customers into a more ratable format as well as a subscription-oriented format, is actually working. Our subscription renewal tailwind is kicking in. So the stuff that was a headwind for us two, three years ago is actually becoming a nice, a nice tailwind. And this last quarter was testimony to that.
We've also been, you know, we've talked about our execution internally, really aligning our sales force, our marketing campaigns, our, our demand generation campaigns, all the things that you'd expect to avail of the opportunity in front of us around cyber. So that's, you know, that's kicking in nicely as well. And, and green shoots on some of the, some of the demand we're seeing, on, on cyber resilience. And the third is the new platform, you know, the platform, the actual Commvault Cloud powered by Metallic AI platform that, we're seeding into customers at this point. Technologies like, like Clean Room Recovery are really beginning to get customers' attention. So, you know, if you, if you I...
Not perfect math, but I'd say 75% of what we're seeing is a combination of what we're doing and good execution, alongside the fact that we're solving the top-- externally, we're solving a really hard problem for customers. You know, cyber threats are real, and what we're able to do for them is meaningful.
Howard Ma (Director, Equity Research Analyst, Software Sector)
Okay. That's really good color, and thank you for quantifying that, Sanjay. I have a follow-up for Gary. Gary, with the recent launch of Commvault Cloud and these new security bundles, can you give us some numbers around initial traction in cross-selling these security modules to existing customers and as well as adoption by net new logos? Thanks.
Gary Merrill (CFO)
Yeah. Morning, Howard. Nice to talk again this morning. So a couple things is, as you know, we, our announcements related to our new platform, Commvault Cloud, just hit the market just a couple months ago, okay? So where we're focused now is on demand gen. So in starting to see some of the early benefits that we start to see in, in our, in our pipeline and in the funnel that we're creating, that's also reflected in our, in our Q4 outlooks, okay? What this will do is, it's going to give us an amazing opportunity for expansion as well. None of that is reflective in our results for Q3. So our results in Q3, as Sanjay said, was about executing against the pipeline. We had strong close rates that we, that, that accelerated quarter-over-quarter.
What we're seeing now is building that demand gen for next fiscal year and the ability to cross-sell through our install base. We finally have a platform that makes the buying process for our customers easy between software and SaaS-
Sanjay Mirchandani (President & CEO)
Exactly.
Gary Merrill (CFO)
and facilitates that expansion opportunity to go from our foundational model that we have today, all the way through the cyber resilience offering that we've announced.
Sanjay Mirchandani (President & CEO)
Yeah. And Howard, Sanjay here. You know, it's quite honestly, it's still early to quantify in dollar terms the impact, but we're very, very positive about it from what we see as the pipeline builds. I'll give you some - I'll just give you an anecdotal point of view. The number of conversations I've had with security teams and CISOs since we launched on November eighth has been unprecedented. We're seeing, you know, really deep dives on the fact that what we call Shift Right, our ability to really take the customer journey and make sure that protection and then resilience are at the core of how they think about cyber recovery, is key.
And we're having deep conversations, proof of concepts, more than we ever have because, you know, we've been able to really bring to light the completeness of the platform.
Howard Ma (Director, Equity Research Analyst, Software Sector)
Thanks, guys. Really, really exciting stuff. Thanks.
Gary Merrill (CFO)
Thanks, Howard.
Sanjay Mirchandani (President & CEO)
Thank you, Howard.
Operator (participant)
Your next question comes from the line of James Fish with Piper Sandler. Your line is open.
James Fish (Managing Director, Senior Research Analyst)
Hey, guys, great quarter. Just building off the last few that we've asked around, cyber resiliency strength. Look, I know it can be hard to really parse out, but what percentage of customers are buying the cyber, buying for cybersecurity use cases at this point? Or what's really the exposure to cyber budgets rather than kind of the traditional backup and recovery? How often is a chief information security officer, for example, in the room as you guys are in that final pitch?
Sanjay Mirchandani (President & CEO)
I just, hey, Jim, it's Sanjay. I just, you know, I just sort of touched on that in the previous, Howard's question. You know, we're seeing a lot of security conversations. And by the way, we, you know, this wasn't our first foray into security. We've had security in our product for a long time. Last June, we announced a series of innovations, and then we followed it up in November, and we continue to follow that up now. You know, data, even before cyber resilience, data protection without information security was pointless. There was nothing there. So we had security built into our overall data protection platform, which we've extended, you know, end to end with our cyber resilience capabilities.
Okay, let me give you an example, and I've said this for a long time: data protection and data security are merging, and I think they've officially come together. So if you're recovering from a breach or a threat or an attack, and you're recovering data, you can't just blindly bring data back. You have to make sure that you're threat scanning that data for any vulnerability that may have been added since you backed up, okay, or new in the environment. So threat scanning, which was a typical security Shift Left capability, is completely integrated with recovery capabilities. So that's what we've been doing. And so it's very hard to sort of segregate and say, this is security versus this is protection. It is resilience, and we've been doing this for a while.
I mean, yes, customers may talk to us and say, "Hey, we want to talk about data protection," but it's really in light of the fact that the threat that they're protecting against is cyber. So it's all, it's all one platform, one capability.
James Fish (Managing Director, Senior Research Analyst)
Makes sense, Sanjay. I appreciate that. I think, Gary, you had mentioned, you guys are looking to invest, on the go-to-market side. Just can you elaborate a little bit more on the details there? You know, how many heads, should we be looking for you guys to add in this upcoming quarter in order to hit those objectives? Is it gonna be mainly on the inside sales team or looking more at kind of field? Thanks, guys.
Gary Merrill (CFO)
Yes. Thanks, Jim, and good morning. Yeah, in some of my prepared remarks, I did talk a little about investment. So I think foundational to what Sanjay and I have always talked about, it's about profitable and responsible growth. So that's always, that is our foundation. But as I look out in the next year, some of the investments that we're starting to make is to really be able to capitalize on the growth opportunity that's in front of us. We're seeing the world of cyber resilience come together to give us this amazing opportunity to hopefully accelerate growth. And with that does require some level of investment, okay?
It's more about making sure that we continue to generate the demand around cyber resilience, make sure that we are targeting the right buyers and the decision makers that can help drive the decisions related to cyber resilience, and more and most importantly, continue to make sure we have the right resources and campaigns around accelerating our SaaS model, okay? What some of these investments require is that alignment, especially into the partner ecosystem, okay? So if I look at the partner ecosystem, there's really three key pieces that we're focused on. Number one is hyperscalers. We're starting to see some great acceleration with the hyperscalers. We did the largest amount of revenue ever through multiple marketplaces this quarter, and we want to capitalize on that momentum. It's also building out the MSP route, especially with our SaaS-focused product.
And third, a lot of these large transformational cyber projects are totally integrated with GSIs and alliances, okay? So if you try to think about some of the areas that are important to us to capitalize on the growth, they're the key areas we're focused on.
James Fish (Managing Director, Senior Research Analyst)
Makes sense. Great quarter, guys.
Gary Merrill (CFO)
Thank you.
Sanjay Mirchandani (President & CEO)
Thank you.
Operator (participant)
Your next question comes from the line of Rudy Kessinger with D.A. Davidson. Your line is open.
Rudy Kessinger (Senior Research Analyst)
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions, and I'll add my congrats to what looks like a great quarter. Some really good numbers here. On SaaS, you know, growth reaccelerated last quarter, a bit sustained this quarter, 77% SaaS ARR growth. The net new SaaS ARR is just really impressive. Could you talk about, just when you look at the growth in Metallic, you know, quarter-over-quarter, just what percent of that new SaaS ARR is coming from cross-sells versus new customers? And also, do you have any conversions in there yet, or is it still mostly true organic ARR growth?
Gary Merrill (CFO)
Hey, hey, Rudy, it's Gary. Good morning, and nice to hear from you today. One of the key things that we look at, too, related to SaaS is how we look at sequentially from an ARR basis, okay? And hitting the $152 million ARR, the sequential growth we had from last quarter to this quarter was an all-time high. So in a numerical, we had the highest sequential increase in SaaS ARR, which just shows to the acceleration we're seeing in the as-a-service delivery model, okay? And it's a combination of two things, as you highlighted. One is, I'll call our land expand new business, and we're still seeing the majority of that from upsell. Okay, upsell, meaning, more of the same workloads, our primary workloads.
We're starting to see the cross-sell start to come in, but it's still the relatively less than the additional workloads of similar functionality. Now, introducing with the new cyber resiliency offerings, we're setting ourselves up for that cross-sell opportunity as we get into the next fiscal year. So we look to next fiscal year for that. But the key driver on the 125% NRR has been upsell. The other key piece, though, is the maturing renewal cycle and driving to really strong growth renewal rates. So we're doing a very good job of now maturing and have a fully mature renewal cycle as well. So those pieces are helping drive that momentum.
Sanjay Mirchandani (President & CEO)
Rudy, Sanjay, I know you didn't directly ask the question, but you know, new customer. As part of our land, our new customer acquisition momentum with our SaaS workloads is growing in the hundreds every quarter. And the attach, you know, the cross-sell of software with SaaS is actually quite something we appreciate and are working on because as customers, which is also a testimony to our single platform strategy as customers move to the hybrid cloud. So they start with one workload and then quickly move into a data center-based workload, because you may have, you know, you may have products that you want to back up in a different way in the data center.
So not only do we look at cross-sell within the SaaS offers, but also cross-selling between software and SaaS, and having a singular platform with the capabilities we have enables that hybrid journey for customers, so they can start anywhere, either in the cloud or on-premise, and then go both ways. And that's a key differentiator for us.
Gary Merrill (CFO)
So Rudy, that's, that's all true growth. There's one last piece to your question I wanted to finish on, is that, what we're seeing in Metallic is not cannibalizing over from converting our install base. You asked that specific- you asked that question specifically, and we're not. That's not part of the, the current, the current play or what's driving the business. This is all about net new business.
Rudy Kessinger (Senior Research Analyst)
Great. That's all very helpful color. I guess just one quick last one on SaaS. Again, you mentioned the record net new SaaS ARR in Q3. You know, if I look back last year at seasonality, your net new Metallic ARR in Q4 was a good step up from Q3. Should we expect to see that play out again this year? I know you're not guiding specifically the SaaS ARR, but I just given you're a month into the quarter, how should we expect net new ARR, SaaS ARR to come in for the March quarter versus December?
Gary Merrill (CFO)
I'll take that, Rudy. It's Gary again. I think the seasonality you saw last year from fiscal Q3 to Q4 is fair for something like we would expect for this year. I think we saw, you know, roughly $15 million or so sequential growth. I think something like that or slightly more is what our objective would be, is to keep that momentum going. We have a strong pipeline going into the quarter, and we're seeing our close rates continue to improve as well. So we're optimistic about where we're going to land for the fiscal year.
Sanjay Mirchandani (President & CEO)
We're not calling it, but we're trending it.
Gary Merrill (CFO)
Yep.
Rudy Kessinger (Senior Research Analyst)
Okay, great. That's it for me. Thanks. Thanks for taking my questions again, and congrats, guys.
Gary Merrill (CFO)
Thank you.
Operator (participant)
Your next question comes from the line of Eric Martinuzzi with Lake Street. Your line is open.
Eric Martinuzzi (Senior Research Analyst)
Yeah, I noticed a nice pickup on the Americas region, up 16% year-on-year. Was that kind of broad-based across verticals, or was there any particular verticals that stood out for you?
Gary Merrill (CFO)
Yeah. Hey, Eric, it's Gary. Nice to hear from you again this morning as well. Our Americas had a really strong quarter. From a total perspective, our Americas business was up 16% year-over-year, really driven by that subscription revenue as well. Just the, the total subscription revenue in the Americas was up 43% year-over-year. What we're seeing is really strong traction on some of the larger deals. So larger deals on renewals, as well as kind of, larger land and expand deals. Our big deals, so what we say, kind of those term software deals over $100,000, were up almost 50% year-over-year.
So it's all tied to driving the cyber resilience message and making sure that we are helping our customers solve those difficult problems. Not vertical specific. Last quarter, we talked a lot about Fed. This, this quarter, it was more broad-based across the vertical stream, tied to executing against the renewal stream and the larger deals.
Eric Martinuzzi (Senior Research Analyst)
Got it. And then the, the buyback program, I know, you haven't given us a view for FY 2025, but you've, you've been relatively consistent over at least the past couple of years about this greater than 75% of the annual free cash flow. Is that the intent going forward here, or are you just- are you going to revisit that when you've exhausted the current plan?
Gary Merrill (CFO)
Yeah. So our current guidance will continue to hold. We believe right now that our buybacks are a key part of our responsible growth strategy.
Eric Martinuzzi (Senior Research Analyst)
Mm-hmm.
Gary Merrill (CFO)
And, you know, our publicly facing, stated guidance of at least 75% of free cash flow is a good modeling trend. As you can kind of tell through the nine months, we're well ahead of that. We're north of 100%-
Eric Martinuzzi (Senior Research Analyst)
Right
Gary Merrill (CFO)
... of free cash flow, because we're opportunistic also in the market, and we see the value that we have as a company and our ability to continue to drive shareholder value.
Eric Martinuzzi (Senior Research Analyst)
Got it. Thanks for taking my questions.
Operator (participant)
Your next question comes from the line of Jason Ader with William Blair. Your line is open.
Jason Ader (Equity Research Analyst, Co-Head Technology Group)
Thank you. Good morning, guys. Just wanted to ask about the revenue growth outlook. I know you've talked about, I think, what, 6%-7% growth CAGR from the 2021 Analyst Day. I'm not sure, maybe, maybe you've updated that, but just wanted to get a sense of whether you are reiterating that, you think it could be higher. And then more specifically, as we think about 2025, FY 2025, you know, without pinning you down on guidance right now, do you think the growth could be higher in revenue growth could be higher in 2025 than 2024?
Gary Merrill (CFO)
Okay. Hey, Jason, it's Gary. Good morning. I'll hit a couple of these points. So first, revenue growth for us is ultimately an output of what we're seeing from an ARR perspective. So let me start there, and we're seeing really strong growth. If you look at our ARR growth of 17% this quarter is really strong, and we're seeing that across all of our corporate businesses, okay? Our Q4 guidance implies that we'll end up this fiscal year on the top line, right, roughly in that 6% revenue growth. We have an amazing opportunity to accelerate as we move forward. Obviously, we have not given guidance for FY 25 yet. Clearly, our expectation that FY 25 growth will be higher than FY 24, right?
As we start to get, work towards our next call, next quarter, we will give a little more clarity on full year FY 2020 actual results. But most importantly is, we see the opportunity in the market. That's key. So as we see the opportunity in the market, we can continue to build on the momentum from the quarter we just had, and clearly, our expectation is that our growth next year will be higher than this year on the top line.
Jason Ader (Equity Research Analyst, Co-Head Technology Group)
Mm-hmm.
Gotcha. Okay, great. And then another one for you, Gary. Can you give us a sense of how much revenue in a given quarter is actually effectively, let's call it, in the bag at the, you know, on kind of day one of the quarter, in terms of... And that would include renewals. Let's just assume you're gonna get the renewal there. I know you don't always get 100%, but let's just assume you're gonna get the renewal, and then committed contracts, which I guess would be,
Gary Merrill (CFO)
Yeah.
Jason Ader (Equity Research Analyst, Co-Head Technology Group)
Support and SaaS. So those two things combined, how much of your revenue in a given quarter is actually coming from those sources today?
Gary Merrill (CFO)
Yeah. So you can, we don't quantify specifically, right? I'll say, what's the contractual revenue we have in the bag on, on Q1 or at day one of the quarter. Though, as you look at a couple key pieces, you know, we disclose our SaaS ARR. So you can take our SaaS ARR and divide it by roughly four, and you could, that's almost guaranteed you get that piece. And the other piece is customer support, right? That's very predictable. So when you look at just those two pieces, SaaS and customer support, you have a very strong starting point to the quarter. It's how we see it. The renewal piece, then we just drive leverage, and the incremental that goes over our land and expand business.
I think where I'll close is that on a relative basis, each quarter becomes more and more predictable than the previous, with some of these foundational pieces, and that's what we kind of focus is on, in increasing predictability sequentially as each quarter goes.
Jason Ader (Equity Research Analyst, Co-Head Technology Group)
Let me, okay, let me just ask this in a slightly different way. I don't know if you're gonna answer it, but I'm gonna try. Of your $100,000+ deals today, you know, how much are actual renewals versus, you know, basically new business or upsell business?
Gary Merrill (CFO)
Yeah. Yeah. Both, both are healthy contributions.
Sanjay Mirchandani (President & CEO)
Both are,
Gary Merrill (CFO)
yeah.
Sanjay Mirchandani (President & CEO)
Well, we can't, we can't get into the specifics.
Gary Merrill (CFO)
Yeah, we're not going to get into those specifics, but they're both, they're both very healthy contributions.
Jason Ader (Equity Research Analyst, Co-Head Technology Group)
And it's obviously a lot higher today than it was a couple of years ago.
Gary Merrill (CFO)
You got it.
Sanjay Mirchandani (President & CEO)
Yeah, that's fair.
Jason Ader (Equity Research Analyst, Co-Head Technology Group)
All right. Thank you, guys.
Operator (participant)
Your next question comes from the line of Tom Blakey with KeyBanc Capital Markets. Your line is open.
Tom Blakey (VP, Equity Research Analyst)
Hey, good morning, guys, and, great, great execution here and solid results. Congratulations.
Gary Merrill (CFO)
Thank you.
Tom Blakey (VP, Equity Research Analyst)
Just wanna maybe piggyback on Jason there on the potential renewal opportunity. You're pretty clear about saying that fiscal 3Q, we just passed, was a very large opportunity for the company. I think the one of the largest, I think Gary said, and that fiscal 4Q would be lower. Maybe Jason literally just asked this, but what will the renewal opportunity that it seems like you have, you know, solid, you know, grasp around this, will the renewal opportunity in fiscal 2025 be bigger or, or, you know, the same as fiscal 2024?
Gary Merrill (CFO)
Got it. So, hey, Tom, it's Gary, and I'll jump in and let me give you a little, maybe just foundational pieces that will help now to start by 25. Fiscal Q3 is typically our largest because it's tied to all the calendar year-end, right, deals we've done over a corporate period. And fiscal Q4 will be modestly lower, so not significantly, but lower. Okay? So that means that the seasonality of the second half is always stronger than the first half of any fiscal year, and that trend, as I look into next year, will continue. On an overall basis, I would expect the renewal population next year to be larger than the renewal population this year, but not by the same amount that we saw this year, right? This year had a larger sequential year-over-year.
Next will be larger, but to less a much lesser extent.
Tom Blakey (VP, Equity Research Analyst)
Much less from fiscal 2022 to fiscal 20-
Gary Merrill (CFO)
Yeah.
Tom Blakey (VP, Equity Research Analyst)
I'm sorry, fiscal 2024, but higher than fiscal 2024, nonetheless. That's helpful.
Gary Merrill (CFO)
Confirmed.
Tom Blakey (VP, Equity Research Analyst)
Thank you, Gary, and maybe to Sanjay, just in the context of, you know, the expanding opportunity set that you have here with regard to cyber resilience, you know, we agree with you in terms of the convergence of data recovery and data security last couple of years here. You know, talk to us about like maybe incentives, and the capacity that you have internally, to have, you know, a Commvault in terms of attacking the opportunities you climb up to the CISO, kind of suite there.
Sanjay Mirchandani (President & CEO)
Sorry, what was the last part of your question?
Tom Blakey (VP, Equity Research Analyst)
You know, so in terms of in addition to incentives, what kind of capacity do you have or need to be continued built out to kind of, you know-
Sanjay Mirchandani (President & CEO)
Sure.
Tom Blakey (VP, Equity Research Analyst)
You know, approach the CISO suite in terms of discussions?
Sanjay Mirchandani (President & CEO)
Okay. So, I mean, incentives, I mean, they're, you know, we continue to fine-tune that as needed, obviously within the comp plans. But really what's more important is the investment and focus we've put around enabling our sales force and our ecosystem on our new capabilities around cyber resilience. Kind of unprecedented how much time and effort we've put, and cost we've put into getting that right. And that's an ongoing journey. We've also brought in some really seasoned security, we call them field CTOs, to really enable our customer conversations alongside our field. We've got some specialists as well, that understand security inside now, practitioners.
We've also announced recently our cyber resilience board, which is a board of absolute luminaries in the field of cybersecurity, headed by Melissa Hathaway, who was an advisor and a part of two presidential administrations on security and cybersecurity. So we're really amping not just the product, but also the capabilities, the thought leadership around it and enablement, you know, within that. So there's a lot of work going on. And yes, it'd be wrong for me to forget. We've also, you know, as part of the platform, it's a subtlety, but it's an important piece, which is we've actually gone. We've shifted left.
In other words, we have integrated and continue to integrate and continue to increase the ecosystem of connections into what we call the identify and defend, the perimeter security folks. And making sure that the technology our customers use to defend the perimeter and manage it is something we integrate with because it makes both sides, the recovery and resilience side, which we do, and, you know, the defend and identify side that our partners do. And working together, we make the customer safer. And so, you know, there's a lot of work that we've been at. You know, we announced it all in November, but, you know, we've been at this thing for a long, long time.
Tom Blakey (VP, Equity Research Analyst)
Right.
Sanjay Mirchandani (President & CEO)
Lots to do.
Tom Blakey (VP, Equity Research Analyst)
Great.
Sanjay Mirchandani (President & CEO)
Lots to do. You know, lots to do. Everybody we hire, we try and bring in with a security background, quite simple. You know, as simple as that, as a litmus test. Okay?
Tom Blakey (VP, Equity Research Analyst)
The follow-up there would just be with regard to, you know, the security, you know, budgets at firms, you know, have had, you know, been ever expanding probably for the last decade or more. Do you envision that this is, you know, your initial conversations are along those lines. You mentioned TCO in your preamble. Is this a, you know, Commvault kind of like taking wallet share and consolidating vendors? Or is this more of a, and who would those vendors be? Or is this more of just a continued expansion?
Sanjay Mirchandani (President & CEO)
I think, you know, Tom, I think the fact that the two pieces that have traditionally been separate are coming together from a solution point of view, like the, our platform. Just, you know, we've seen customers at the table with the IT organization, the infrastructure team, as well as the security team, and they're working together, rightfully so, to solve a complex issue, a hard problem. I think they quite—you know, we're seeing the budget sort of bunched together in many customers to say, we, you know, this is, this is not just a data protection piece or a data, you know, security piece. It has to be together. So we, I think, we, you know, I think we're actually seeing efficiencies for customers with the, with the, with the approach we're taking.
It does make it easier because you're not, you don't have internal sort of friction inside a customer.
Tom Blakey (VP, Equity Research Analyst)
Okay, just... Yeah, that's helpful. And just one very quick one. Sorry to have more questions here, but the gross margin guidance was impressive, Gary. Just maybe talk about the moving pieces there, specifically with regard to you know, Metallic and the cloud, you know, scaling here. That'd be helpful enough for me.
Gary Merrill (CFO)
Yeah.
Tom Blakey (VP, Equity Research Analyst)
Thank you, guys.
Gary Merrill (CFO)
Yeah, for sure, and I can wrap up with that question with you. So from a gross margin perspective, getting stability in the gross margin is important, and there's two pieces. One is when you see acceleration in our subscription and a chunk of that driven by subscription term software, they're very high gross margins. So when we get good renewal and good land expand growth, we're going to see gross margin momentum. The key piece, though, to our gross margin is getting stability and leverage on our SaaS gross margins. Okay? We're working very clearly towards our goal of getting into that 70%+ range of gross margins. A year ago, we were in the 50s, and we're now well on our way towards that objective over time of getting to 70%+.
You're starting to see the leverage that we're getting right now on driving improvements in the gross margin on SaaS.
Sanjay Mirchandani (President & CEO)
Very true.
Tom Blakey (VP, Equity Research Analyst)
Great. Thanks, guys. Great quarter.
Gary Merrill (CFO)
Thank you.
Operator (participant)
My apologies. Your next question comes from the line of Aaron Rakers of Wells Fargo. Your line is open.
Aaron Rakers (Managing Director, Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Yeah, thanks, guys. Thanks for the quick follow-up. I'll be brief here. You know, obviously a lot of momentum around the cybersecurity and the resilience attributes of the business. I'm just curious, like architecturally, as we think about the data center and what's evolving, you know, overall around AI, are you starting to see any engagements with customers that you could distinctly say that AI is actually driving this kind of change of sentiment or investment cycle for your business, as enterprises kind of scrub through and think about their data and how they're going to leverage that more, you know, you know, from an AI perspective going forward?
Sanjay Mirchandani (President & CEO)
I mean, the answer, the short answer is you can't have a conversation without AI coming up. That's, that's a fact. Now, what we've done is, you know, Aaron, we've kind of turned... I'll turn your question on its head a little bit. And what we've done is look at what we can do for customers that makes their life better.... because of AI. Now, we've had AI in our technology for many years, but mostly, mostly in machine learning type and automation type scenarios. Now, with, with the newer generation of AI, our first foray into really delivering value, not just AI washing our technology, but truly delivering value, falls into three primary buckets. One is operational scale and resilience, giving them the ability to really work with large volumes of data with deep degrees of automation, okay?
And so the operational AI just enables that, and that's in the product today. The second is really threat and risk management and assessment. So with the number of risks, the threats, and the volume of data that's been written and restored, AI can do a wonderful job helping customers really do the anomaly detection, really do the cyber, get real cyber resilience. So we've built a lot of that into the product. And the one that I think is getting great traction, which I think has immense value, is predictive recovery. The complexity of recovering data with absolutely solid, clean backups for a customer who's just been breached is very complex because of the sophistication of the breaches and the time span between entry and payload.
And so we're using AI to help customers really get a great starting point, and then applying AI across a Clean Room Recovery scenario to really help customers truly be resilient and recover. At the end of the day, that's what matters. And so these are the three... I'm oversimplifying it, but these are the three big buckets under which we've applied AI enough in the first avatar of our technology, and it's continuing. We have a very rich and robust roadmap, and everything I've talked about exists, so there's no AI washing it, of which there's a lot going on right now. And we have to be, you know, we have to be very-- we take a very conservative approach around this because at the end of the day, it's mission-critical data that we're working with for our customers.
Aaron Rakers (Managing Director, Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Thank you.
Sanjay Mirchandani (President & CEO)
Thanks, Aaron.
Operator (participant)
This concludes the question and answer session. I will turn the call over to Michael Melynk for closing remarks.
Michael J Melnyk (Head of Investor Relations)
Thanks, everyone, for joining this morning. As a reminder, the investor relations website has a presentation summarizing our key KPIs. Feel free to reach out to me during the quarter with any questions.
Sanjay Mirchandani (President & CEO)
Thanks very much.
Michael J Melnyk (Head of Investor Relations)
Thank you.
Gary Merrill (CFO)
Thank you.
Operator (participant)
This concludes today's conference call. We thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.